2011/4/9 Bryen M. Yunashko <suserocks@bryen.com>:
On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 22:53 +0200, Klaas Freitag wrote: <snipping most because my response is to different posts within the thread>
So far, everyone's giving some very good points of focus. In terms of format, I'm seeing three different sets here:
- read/only sessions - roundtable/open discussions (or as Pascal likes to say read/write sessions) - hackfests
Why not make roundable/open discussions an hackfests one thing instead of 2? I am still on some heavy painkillers but I am thinking many people in a room for 2-3 hours(or seasons) working and talking in a subject and evolving it, we have 2-3 people in charge on talking notes about it and after that write that down to the wiki of finishing the wiki page about that, or something like that. So we have both a hackfest and an open discussion or at least something really close to both of them.
It would be awesome if we could do all three, but logistically, I wonder if it is workable? If we have too many things, will we be "thinning the herd" so to speak? In other words, would there be spreading us too thin across the board? I think it's worth at least examining this idea to see if it is workable. Theoretically, we've been having hackfests all along, unofficially in the lobby/reception area where people just sit down and "just do it."
One other thing, I had a huge pet-peeve in the last conference. I'm personally not a fan of read-only sessions and was pleased there was a mix of read-only and BoF's scheduled throughout the day. But much to my disappointment, some of those BoFs turned out to be read-only sessions as well. I think we need to make clear to anyone who is organizing a BoF what exactly it is supposed to be about. I.e., NOT sitting in a room listening to one person talk and give slides until time is over. That, to me, was a colossal waste of my time when I was looking forward to actually discussing a particular topic.
As Helen and Pascal both quickly point out, there needs to be time within the conference to focus on ourselves. Klaas rightly asks the question if whether this will appeal to the general public, but I think he answered his own question by pointing out that our community is growing. As such, with a growing community, there's more people who have been newcomers over the past year who *want* to understand the Project more in order to better promote it when they return home.
So, I think we shouldn't be too concerned with "drawing people in" at a marketing-type level but rather just focus on making sure there's a good smorgasbord of Project-related topics that everyone can look at and roll up their sleeves and jump in and discuss. This is important because we want people to leave the conference armed with the knowledge and skills to further promote and grow the community.
And another thing I want to point out. The word "Conference" The first part of that word is "confer." People sometimes seem to forget that important part of "Conference". Confer means to have conversations. So, a high focus on read-only is in direct contradiction to the word "conference."
In terms of areas of focus:
- Broad topics that are not specific to openSUSE but are of interest to openSUSE - Targeted topics that are of specific interest to openSUSE - Blended focus of specific interest to openSUSE yet have interest by non-openSUSE projects.
Really, again Pascal and Helen provided a good plethora of topics that can be discussed from an internal perspective, but also I believe has room for collaboration.and inviting others outside the project to join us. The blended focus approach seems to work best with that goal.
As for the rwxrwxrwx, VERY geeky thing, but I love it just the same. And if people don't understand it, so what? They'll ask! And as soon as they ask and get an explanation, the first thing they'll think is "Hmm, I just learned something. I wonder what else I can learn when I go to the conference?" And rwxrwxrwx very much promotes that openSUSE Project is here to benefit the world, not just ourselves. I see good things from this concept.
I'd like to go ahead and ask the artwork team if they can turn this into a workable piece of art that we can use.
In general, if we want to continue with the concept of "Collaboration across borders" then we need to do more to make the conference itself more collaborative. In 2009, I would argue that we had a more collaborative environment than 2010, but the difference in 2009 is that we did not really know yet what we needed or wanted to talk about (except the governance talks). This time, I believe we have a much clearer (if not perfect) idea of what we are and want to do as a Project and thus I think the collaborative aspect that we saw in 2009 would fit in much better this year of 2011.
So... we've got some good discussions going on here. I'm sure there will be a few more good idea injections along this thread and looking forward to hearing more good ideas. But as I said in the first post, we do need to move quickly and not turn this into an endless discussion.
That means we need to move quickly from "talking" to "doing". So far, I see myself, Alan Clark and Jos Poortvliet signed up to join this Program Committee. Pascal, Klaas, Bruno, JDD, Helen? Will you join up and let's get to organizing and clarifying our program so we can send out a really good Call for Papers by April 27?
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Conference_Planning_2011#Teams
Bryen
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